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24 Tips for
Teaching Writing
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
T
o write well, college students need to read to
deepen their understanding of language. And they
need to write. The 24 essays in this collection will
prompt teachers to help their students grasp changes
in what is acceptable language, explore the mysteries
of word usage, and learn strategies to improve their
writing. The essays are drawn from Lingua Franca, The Chronicle’s
free blog about language in academe. Students can read these posts
and new ones at chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca.
Inspiration for Teaching
4 The ‘Au Revoir’ Problem
5 Recalculating Route
7 Wordsmith Bingo
24 Being an Apostrophe
26 Advisor Advisery
Exercises for the Classroom
Word Usage
9 The ‘However’ Myth
10 Witnessing a Rule Change:
Singular ‘They’
11 Slash: Not Just a
Punctuation Mark Anymore
13 Conversation Piece
Parts of Speech
15
16
17
18
Spelling
What’s the Matter With ‘Me’?
Make Mine Factitive
Time Present
Watching Adverbs
27 20 Things Students Say
Help Them Learn
29 How Dangerous Are Danglers?
31 Labeling Words
32 Trying to Write the Mighty Line
34 Permission to Footnote
36 A Challenge Centered
Around Usage
Language History
37 You Guys!
39 I Am So Uber You
Punctuation
20 The Comma Sutra
22 Say, ‘What’?
23 Dashing Through
Cover photo illustration by Jonathan Barkat for The Chronicle
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Inspiration for Teaching
The ‘Au Revoir’ Problem
It can be disastrous to rely on only your instincts when writing
By BEN YAGODA
W
ay back when I was taking “Introduction to French” during
my freshman year in college, we
were given a quiz a month or so
into the term. At one point, the
professor spoke some French words and we were
asked to spell them. One of the words was the
French phrase for “goodbye.”
This is what I wrote down: “orra voire.”
The professor had competently taught us that
the term is au revoir. And I had learned it, up to a
point. What happened on the day of the quiz (I’ve
concluded in the many times I’ve mused about the
incident since) is that I’d forgotten that French is
a markedly different language from English, and
most definitely so in terms of spelling. Falsely confident, I reverted to a sort of common-sense, instinctual mind-set, and spelled au revoir the way
it sounds.
The reason I think so much about the mistake
is that similar errors come up every week in the
work students do in my writing classes, the aim of
which is to teach them to produce prose on a professional level. That is not the same thing as learning a foreign language, but in both cases, it can be
disastrous, or at least problematic, to rely on your
instincts or on general logic.
The example that immediately occurs to me is a
move so logical it has the word “logic” in its name.
“Logical punctuation” refers to putting commas
and periods outside quotation marks, “like this”.
While it’s accepted in Britain and on Wikipedia
and in some scholarly journals, and is more and
more prevalent in unedited prose on the internet, it is still incorrect in American publishing.
And so at the outset of every semester I stress that
commas and periods always go inside quotation
marks. Of course, students still put them outside,
which I mark with “IQ,” which stands for “inside
quotes.” I revisit the topic in class, and when they
continue to logically punctuate, I point out the error in ALL CAPS, UNDERLINED. Sometimes
I announce that I will deduct a point from their
grade each time they make the error. And inevitably, in the final assignment, some students still do
it. Orra voire.
Journalism — the form of writing I most often
teach — really does resemble a foreign language,
with a great many counterintuitive rules. One that
comes to mind is that journalists are not allowed
to express an opinion, a.k.a. “editorialize.” There’s
no obvious justification for the rule, and as a result, even if they master it for a moment, students
backslide from September through June. Then
there’s the convention of almost always using “said”
as a verb of attribution. That’s as opposed to “stated,” “commented,” “remarked,” and other verbs, all
of which are perfectly good words that would seem
to have the added benefit of reducing word repetition. Word repetition is indeed a flaw in journalistic writing, up to and including “and,” “a,” and
“the” (and students persist in perpetrating it, in an
orra-voire kind of way), but for some reason, “said”
is the one word that gets immunity. Doesn’t make
sense, but you have to learn it, and if you rely on
common sense, you never will.
This phenomenon applies not only to writing,
but to many other endeavors that (unlike, say,
Chinese or computer programming) appear to
resemble stuff we already know how to do. The
trick is to learn to ignore your instincts and your
muscle memory. Skiing, personnel management,
and courtship would seem to qualify. And tennis!
Even today, after 50 years of playing that game,
I sometimes find myself whacking a ball with all
my might and seeing it hit the fence on a fly. In
all these enterprises, there are geniuses whose instincts are preternaturally aligned with best practices, but the rest of us need a lot of help. Malcolm
Gladwell has popularized the 10,000-hour rule —
the idea that that amount of practice is a common
denominator of elite athletes and others who make
extraordinary contributions. I suggest that achieving basic competence in a skill requires a whole
bunch of time and practice, too.
I dedicate this post to fellow faculty members, as
they correct papers and assignments, with a gentle
reminder that many of the writing errors and infelicities you encounter are there not because students are defying you, or are simple-minded, but
because they relied on instinct.
So by all means correct the errors, but when you
speak of them, and you will, be kind.
Ben Yagoda is a professor of English at the University of Delaware.
Originally published on May 10, 2016
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Inspiration for Teaching
Recalculating Route
It’s easy to get lost in class, but it can lead to good results
BY WILLIAM GERMANO
B
ecause I don’t own a car, whenever
I need to rent one I discover, all over
again, the weird comfort of the NeverLost GPS.
I do have a few skills that operate at
a fairly high level, but spatial orientation isn’t one
of them. The idea of never being lost — or of being
NeverLost ™ — seems like a dream. (That word
neverlost is absurd. Is it a rock star’s California
ranch? A classic of Edwardian children’s lit?)
When I drive, I use the GPS constantly, sometimes talking back to the voice of the Electronic
Lady (“Can’t you be clearer? I already know that!
No, it’s not a turn, it’s only a very slight bend. … ”),
but mainly I’m grateful that there’s a satellite that
knows how to get me to Exit 18.
And yet somehow I can’t — or won’t — always
follow the Electronic Lady’s directions. When that
happens she announces, with an impressive absence of judgmental tone, that she is “recalculating
route.” I’ve done something that makes her plans
for me quite impossible.
For a moment I am reminded that I haven’t
just got myself lost, I’ve got the Electronic Lady
lost, too, and now she’s drawing down that higher
knowledge with which she will describe a new path
to the destination. I hear “recalculating route” at
least once every time I rent a car, and I realize it’s
my favorite part of what the Electronic Lady has to
say to me. Or maybe I just like getting safely lost.
DAVE CUTLER FOR THE CHRONICLE
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It is easy to get lost in a class — easy for students, especially those for whom the material isn’t
easy at all, but easy for the professor, too.
Sure, it’s possible to script a course so that being lost is an impossibility. But that’s the kind of
course I’ve never taught, won’t, and probably can’t.
As for scripts, if you watched Westworld, you know
that scripts are external impositions, doomed to go
wrong. I will not mention Dolores or Wyatt again.
Getting lost is the risk the teacher takes. There
are better and less-good ways of being lost and,
pace Robert Frost, always more than two roads diverging in whatever yellow wood I’m trying to explore with my students.
I’ve come to a stage in teaching where I’m expecting to recalculate the route whenever we meet.
Sure, there is the grudging reformulation of the
class’s objectives on days when it’s clear that they
haven’t done the reading, or when the student who
was to give a class presentation was suddenly felled
by a mysterious, quite temporary, and utterly nonthreatening malady.
So you recalculate route. You ad lib, you review
materials, pull out the “For Emergency Use Only”
pages in the notebook you carry, or turn whatever
you have to work with into a teaching moment.
Not every recalculated route involves making
the students run the classroom, at least for a while,
but sometimes that’s what has to happen. Nobody
promised that recalculating would be entirely on
your own terms.
Some courses can be taught where everything
has to operate flawlessly or the course fails. If you
do teach that way, try taking a different exit, just
once, and see if you don’t still wind up at a good
destination, maybe even the destination you intended to begin with, only at a different entry
point.
When you teach you’re the driver and the Electronic Lady at the same time, showing the map,
announcing the landmarks and the turns, letting
the carload know, as unjudgmentally as you can,
that the route needs to be recalculated.
Getting a little lost in the classroom can be a
good thing. It’s not quite like being with your robotic Hertz companion, but it’s an opportunity I’ve
come to expect and even enjoy.
William Germano is dean of humanities at the
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science.
Originally published on November 29, 2016
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Inspiration for Teaching
Wordsmith Bingo
What are the defining characteristics of good prose?
BY BEN YAGODA
M
y Facebook (and actual) friend Gene Seymour posted this the other day:
Some 40 years ago, Wilfrid Sheed began his
post-mortem for Cyril Connolly by asking who
the best living writer of English prose is now.
His pal John Leonard made a case for Malcolm
Muggeridge while Sheed tossed out such eminences of the era as Cheever & E.B. White, concluding that what complicated the cases for both
was that neither could likely do what the other
could. (I vaguely remember that being the case.)
Anyway, thinking about it now, I wonder who
we’d suggest this minute. And wondered, also,
whether the time & place for such questions has
passed us all by.
A lively discussion ensued. Some commenters (I
believe) misunderstood Gene’s question and bandied about the names of such favorite novelists
as Roth, Pynchon, Tóibín, Marilynne Robinson,
Cormac McCarthy, and Zadie Smith. But from the
names he mentioned — Connolly, Muggeridge,
White, and Sheed and Leonard themselves — I
took “best living writer of English prose” to refer to
a more generalized person of letters, someone who
had at his or her command the full range of English diction and rhetorical figures. Commenters
mentioned Naipaul, Theroux, and Didion: all good
candidates, in my opinion, and notable for having
(like Connolly et al.) not confined themselves to
any one genre, but gone back and forth among fiction, reportage, memoir, essay, and criticism. Some
of the names that came to my own mind were
Anthony Lane of The New Yorker, James Wolcott
of Vanity Fair, Virginia Heffernan of the internet, and Russell Baker of, well, of writing. But if I
had to pick one person it would probably be Clive
James, the great Australian-English critic, whose
wonderful Unreliable Memoirs (1980) is very much
in the Connolly mode.
But Gene may be right in suggesting that the
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t h e c h ro n ic l e o f h ig h e r e duc a t io n time for such personages has passed. Muggeridge,
Connolly, Orwell, and Waugh were all born in
1903. Graham Greene came on the scene the following year, and Henry Green and Anthony Powell
the year after that. It was an amazing literary generation, memorably chronicled by Martin Green
in Children of the Sun. Part of their distinctiveness
came from the way they straddled eras and sensibilities; Green emphasized the shadow cast over
their lives and careers by the Great War, which
killed or damaged so many of their older brothers
and schoolmates.
Connolly spent a lot of his memoir, Enemies of
Promise (1938), talking about prose style, specifically the contrast between what he called the Mandarin and vernacular styles. The vernacular offers
“the cursive style, the agreeable manners, the precise and poetical impact of Forster’s diction, the
lucidity of Maugham … the timing of Hemingway,
the smooth cutting edge of Isherwood, the indignation of Lawrence, the honesty of Orwell, … ”
The Mandarin style, on the other hand:
is beloved by literary pundits, by those who
would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those
writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than
they feel, it is the style of most artists and all
humbugs. …
The Mandarin style at its best yields the richest
and most complete expression of the English language. It is the diction of Donne, Browne, Addison, Johnson, Gibbon, de Quincey, Landor, Carlyle,
and Ruskin as opposed to that of Bunyan, Dryden,
Locke, Defoe, Cowper, Cobbett, Hazlitt, Southey,
and Newman. It is characterized by long sentences with many dependent clauses, by the use of the
subjunctive and conditional, by exclamations and
interjections, quotations, allusions, metaphors, long
images, Latin terminology, subtlety, and conceits.
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Its cardinal assumption is that neither the writer
nor the reader is in a hurry, that both are possessed
of a classical education and a private income.
I agree with Connolly’s contention that in modern times, in order for a writer to last, he or she
must take from both schools. That’s pretty much
what the critic F.W. Bateson (1901-78) was saying
when he set down, in 1966, what I consider the
best short list of the “defining characteristics of
good prose: a preference for short sentences diversified by an occasionally very long one; a tone that
is relaxed and almost colloquial; a large vocabulary that enjoys exploiting the different etymological and social levels of words; and an insistence on
verbal and logical precision.”
The mention of John Leonard, the late critic for
the Times and many other outlets, brought to mind
my own first published essay in a national publication. It was a (loving) parody of the column Leonard wrote for the Times in the late 70s, “Private
Lives.” (The columns were collected in a book, Private Lives in the Imperial City. I see a used copy
is available for $.01. Buy it.) At the time, I wasn’t
clued-in enough to follow either the vernacular or
the Mandarin school. So I repaired myself to the
New York Public Library Annex — which was so
far west on 43rd Street that I believe it was be-
tween 15th and 16th Avenues — and read dozens
of Leonard’s columns on microfilm. I made a chart
quantifying his devices and mannerisms, and used
that as a template for my takeoff.
That’s obviously not the most organic way to
do humor, but my piece, “Personal Existence,”
was nevertheless accepted over the transom by
the weekly Village Voice. The editor said he didn’t
know when he’d have room for it and would let
me know. But he didn’t. I was too cheap/poor to
buy the paper, so each week I would go to the aptly named Epiphany Branch of the NYPL, on East
23rd Street, and read the table of contents to see if
it was in. The Voice came out on Wednesday, and
one Tuesday I happened to be flipping through
the previous week’s paper and discovered that my
piece was buried so deep, between the futon and
escort ads, and considered so negligible that it
hadn’t made the table of contents and had escaped
my notice the previous Wednesday. I ran out to
try to find a copy, and finally located the last dogeared one on offer at a newsstand on the northwest
corner of 23rd and 3rd.
Good times.
Ben Yagoda is a professor of English at the University of Delaware.
Originally published on October 30, 2014
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Word Usage
The ‘However’ Myth
W
By Geoff Pullum
hen I see the dumb prohibitions
that college-educated speakers of
American English have been coerced into believing, it makes me
want to weep. In another article
in this guide (“The Comma Sutra,” Page 20), my colleague and electronic pen pal Ben Yagoda reported
these fully correct judgments (I mark the ungrammatical example with a star):
1. *The weather is great today, however it’s supposed to rain tomorrow.
2. The weather is great today, but it’s supposed to
rain tomorrow.
3. The weather is great today. However, it’s supposed to rain tomorrow.
Ben is right: The first is a run-on error or comma
splice, but the other two are fine. Yet a significant
number of the nearly 700 online comments he got
on an article on grammar that he wrote for The New
York Times expressed the opinion that sentence No.
3 is some kind of grammar error. Ye gods.
I blame those old fools Strunk and White. “In the
meaning ‘nevertheless,’ ” wrote William Strunk in
1918, this adverb is “not to come first in its sentence
or clause”; and E.B. White kept a similar statement
in the 1959 reanimation of The Elements of Style:
“Avoid starting a sentence with ‘however’ when the
meaning is ‘nevertheless’,” it says (Page 48). “The
word usually serves better when not in first position.”
Is this good advice? Well, don’t just hang your
head and worry: Investigate! You are as capable as I
am. Go to Project Gutenberg, download some classic books from when Strunk was a young man (the
late 1800s), and use your word processor to search
for occurrences of “however” at the beginning of a
sentence. Let’s start with The Importance of Being
Earnest (1895). In the opening scene, Algernon says:
“However, it makes no matter.” When interviewing Jack, Lady Bracknell says: “However, I am quite
ready to enter your name,” and a bit later, “However,
that could easily be altered.” In the last act Jack says:
“However, you have got to catch the four-five,” and
Dr. Chasuble says: “However, as your present mood
seems to be one peculiarly secular, I will return to
the church at once.”
Are we supposed to think Oscar Wilde was unable
to represent Algernon Moncrieff and Lady Bracknell
and Jack Worthing (a.k.a. Ernest Moncrieff) and the
learned Dr. Chasuble as speaking Standard English
correctly? This is insanity.
You will find sentence-initial uses of the adverb
“however” in works by Lewis Carroll, Willa Cather,
Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Henry James, Arthur Machen, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Bram Stoker, Mark Twain — in fact, by every author I have investigated.
The hundred-year nightmare of grammar instruction in this country has littered the brains of many
college-educated Americans with many lies told
by incompetent grammar and style gurus. Few are
more obvious than this one. Yet anyone who reports
on what the facts show is likely to be charged with
dumbing down, or ignoring the rules, or being leftwing, or thinking that anything goes.
How can I free people from the self-imposed burden of these mythical constraints, these “rules” that
good writers do not respect and never did?
Perhaps this observation will help: Strunk and
White assert that “When however comes first, it
means in whatever way or to whatever extent.” This
is not true, but it gives a useful clue about their concern. They seem to imagine that there is a danger of
ambiguity. It is not true. Certainly, these two sentences share the same sequence of letters:
4. However it turns out, we’ll be covered.
5. However, it turns out we’ll be covered.
In No. 4, the “however” means “no matter how,”
and in No. 5 it means “nonetheless.” But the commas
clarify everything. In the terms of The Cambridge
Grammar of the English Language, the exhaustive
conditional adjunct that begins (4) must not have a
comma after the first word, while the supplementary
connective adjunct that begins (5) must be followed
by a comma. The idea that all ambiguity in English
should or could be avoided is absurd, of course, but
for what it is worth, no ambiguity arises here.
The connective adjunct “however” has always been
grammatically and stylistically permitted as the first
word of an independent clause, and there is no reason to think otherwise unless you believe authoritarian old nitwits like Strunk and White when they
assert something that, as the literature of their time
will readily show you, is entirely without rationale.
Please, educated Americans everywhere, stop wasting your time on learning and remembering ridiculous usage stipulations like this. Break free, and leave
such linguistically unmotivated nonsense behind.
Geoff Pullum is a professor of linguistics at the
University of Edinburgh.
Originally published on June 7, 2012
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Word Usage
Witnessing a Rule Change:
Singular ‘They’
A newspaper stirs up dissent by permitting the usage as a last resort
By Anne Curzan
I
have a new favorite mug. It was given to me
by the graduate students in the joint program
in English and education (JPEE) and celebrates my advocacy of singular they — with
an explanatory footnote.
But when can we stop including the footnote?
We got one step closer in December 2015, when
Bill Walsh, chief of the night copy desk at The Washington Post, sent an email to the newsroom announcing some changes in the
style guidelines. In addition
to eliminating the hyphen in
email and endorsing the spelling mic over mike, his email
gave in to singular they as “permissible” when rewriting the
sentence to make it plural is
“impossible or hopelessly awkward.” Walsh also noted the
usefulness of they when referring to people who identify outside the male-female binary.
Walsh’s email — and more
specifically the part of his
email about singular they —
made headlines, including an
article by Bill Walsh himself.
John E. McIntyre, night content production editor at The
Baltimore Sun and a longtime
advocate of singular they, published a nice piece
addressing some of the common objections to it.
And Arika Okrent, blogging at Mental Floss, predicted that other news organizations will follow
the Post’s lead. I would guess she is right.
This is how rules change: one style guide at a
time. And often cautiously. Walsh does not wholeheartedly embrace singular they. He frames it as a
permissible last resort when there is no way to get
around the need for a generic singular pronoun.
When nothing terrible happens — readers are not
confused by singular they, if they even notice it,
and no one cancels their subscription to the newspaper over it — singular they will become an ever
more standard option.
It will take a while for widespread acceptance
of singular they among English teachers and copy
editors. After all, some of them are still strictly enforcing the rule about not splitting infinitives, and
that was cautiously accepted by Oxford and others
some 20 years ago. But I think it is fair to say that
singular they now has its foot solidly in the door of
acceptable English usage. Or, to change the metaphor, the gatekeepers of formal English usage have
cracked open the gate.
As a historian of the English
language, I have accepted this
cautious creep toward acceptability, even though there is nothing
grammatically wrong with singular they other than the fact that
people say there is something
wrong with it. It makes sense
that the dissipation of long-established grammar and style rules
takes time.
As a professor of English and a
copy editor, I am one of the gatekeepers when it comes to what
counts as “acceptable” in formal,
edited prose. I am doing and
will continue to do what I can to
speed things along: I voted “comANNE CURZAN
pletely acceptable” for all the sentences with singular they on the
2015 usage survey for The American Heritage
Dictionary of the English Language; I will continue to use singular they in my own academic
writing; I talk with students about the debate in
class; and obviously I can’t seem to help but write
about singular they on the Lingua Franca blog.
The next step is to assume that my readers will
see singular they as standard enough (e.g., in the
line above about no one canceling their subscription) that it merits no special comment.
I have decided to keep the mug and drop the
footnote.
Anne Curzan is a professor of English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Originally published on December 16, 2015
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Word Usage
Slash:
Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore
Students show why slash has become the word to watch
By Anne Curzan
I
n the undergraduate history of English
course I am teaching this term, I request/
require that the students teach me two new
slang words every day before I begin class. I
learn some great words this way (e.g., hangry “cranky or angry due to feeling hungry”;
adorkable “adorable in a dorky way”). More importantly, the activity reinforces for students a
key message of the course: that the history of English is happening all around us (and that slang is
humans’ linguistic creativity at work, not linguistic corruption).
Two weeks ago, one student brought up the word
slash as an example of new slang, and it quickly
became clear to me that many students are using
slash in ways unfamiliar to me. In the classes since
then, I have come to the students with follow-up
questions about the new use of slash. Finally, a student asked, “Why are you so interested in this?” I
answered, “Slang creates a lot of new nouns, verbs,
adjectives, and adverbs. It isn’t that often that
slang creates a new conjunction.”
Let me explain. Lots of us use the slash (/) in
writing to capture two or more descriptions of the
same thing, with a meaning something like “or,”
“and,” or “and/or” — e.g., “my sister/best friend” or
“request/require.” The slash typically separates two
things that are the same part of speech or parallel
grammatically; and we can say that slash out loud
if needed: “my sister slash best friend.”
Now I wouldn’t write that phrase down that way,
with the slash spelled out, but students tell me they
now often do. A student kindly sent me some real
examples from her Facebook chat (shared with her
permission):
1. Does anyone care if my cousin comes and visits slash stays with us Friday night?
2. I have been asking everyone I know in the
Chicago area if they’re going slash if they’d
willing [sic] to let me tag along slash show me
around because frankly I’d have no idea how to
get around Chicago on my own
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t h e c h ro n ic l e o f h ig h e r e duc a t io n Another student sent me this excerpt from her
blog post:
3. … culminating in Friday’s shootout-slashcar-chase-slash-manhunt-slash-media-circus
around the apprehension of the bombing suspect.
That same student then provided me this example of slash, which demonstrates a slightly different, although clearly related, meaning:
4. I spent all day in the UgLi [library] yesterday
writing my French paper slash posting pictures
of cats on my sister’s Facebook wall.
As this sentence makes clear, the slash is distinguishing between (a) the activity that the speaker
or writer was intending to do or should have been
doing, and (b) the activity that the speaker or writer actually did or anticipated they would do (yes,
I did use “they” as a singular right there — more
on that in “Witnessing a Rule Change: Singular
‘They,’ ” on the opposite page). Other students provided these additional examples:
5. I went to class slash caught up on Game of
Thrones. [I made sure to clarify that this was
not in reference to our class!]
6. I need to go home and write my essay slash
take a nap.
If the story of slash ended there, with a perfectly
logical semantic extension of slash from its more
conventional use, I wouldn’t be writing about it
here on Lingua Franca. But for at least a good number of students, the conjunctive use of slash has extended to link a second related thought or clause
to the first with a meaning that is often not quite
“and” or “and/or” or “as well as.” It means something more like “following up.” Here are some real
examples from students:
7. I really love that hot dog place on Liberty
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Street. Slash can we go there tomorrow?
8. Has anyone seen my moccasins anywhere?
Slash were they given to someone to wear home
ever?
9. I’ll let you know though. Slash I don’t know
when I’m going to be home tonight
10. so what’ve you been up to? slash should we be
skyping?
11. finishing them right now. slash if i don’t finish
them now they’ll be done in first hour tomorrow
The student who searched her Facebook chat
records found instances of this use of slash as far
back as 2010. (When I shared a draft of this post
with the students in the class to make sure I have
my facts straight, several noted that in examples
like (7) and (9), they would be more likely to use a
comma in between the clauses and a lower-case
“slash.”)
The innovative uses of slash don’t stop there either: Some students are also using slash to introduce an afterthought that is also a topic shift, captured in this sample text from a student:
12. JUST SAW ALEX! Slash I just chubbed on oat-
meal raisin cookies at north quad and i miss you
This innovative conjunction (or conjunctive adverb, depending on how you want to interpret it)
occurs, students tell me, even more commonly in
speech than in writing. And in writing, it is often
getting written out as slash, even in electronically
mediated communication, where one might expect
the quicker punctuation mark (/) rather than the
five-letter word slash.
Slash is clearly a word to watch. Slash I do
mean word, not punctuation mark. The emergence of a new conjunction/conjunctive adverb
(let alone one stemming from a punctuation
mark) is like a rare-bird sighting in the world of
linguistics: an innovation in the slang of young
people embedding itself as a function word in the
language. This use of slash is so commonplace
for students in my class that they almost forgot
to mention it as a new slang word this term. That
young people have integrated innovative slash
into their language while barely noticing its presence is all the more reason that conjunctive slash
might have staying power.
Anne Curzan is a professor of English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Originally published on April 24, 2013
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Word Usage
Conversation Piece
The more colloquial word is usually better
By Ben Yagoda
“Writing, when properly managed, (as you may
be sure I think mine is) is but a different name
for conversation.” — Laurence Sterne
“The great struggle of a writer is to learn to write
as he would talk.” — Lincoln Steffens
“The greatest [writers] give the impression that
their style was nursed by the closest attention to
colloquial speech.” — Thornton Wilder
“Good prose should resemble the conversation of
a well-bred man.” — Somerset Maugham
T
hese quotations, in their various ways,
get to a deceptively simple truth about
good writing. That is, it should be similar
to speech, but. … The but is expressed by
Sterne in “properly managed,” by Steffens in “would,” by Wilder in “the impression,” by
Maugham in “should” and “well-bred.” Everyone
knows that pure speech doesn’t work on the page.
Transcribe any conversation (except maybe one between John Updike and Clive James) and you will
see rampant halts and starts, “um”s and “uh”s, redundancies, ellipses, grammatical solecisms, and
all manner of infelicities.
That’s the chaff. Once you’ve separated out the wheat of spoken language, your
writing can reap three significant benefits.
One of them is diction. Given a choice of
two synonymous words ( funny/humorous, often/frequently, about/regarding),
the simpler, more colloquial one is usually
better, but weak writers make a beeline for
the fancy one, and often misuse it, to boot.
The critic James Wolcott once told me in an
interview,
I never use words in print that I wouldn’t
use in conversation. There are all these
words you see in print but in fact nobody
ever says. Words like “hauntingly lyrical”
or “indefatigable,” which is even hard to
say. … Then there are hedge-words [critics] use in negative reviews — “given
such-and-such, it’s unfortunate. … ”
Or “it’s lamentable.” Come on, you don’t
think it’s lamentable, you’re enjoying it.
Second, straying from the usually simple syntax of spoken language can be a
problem. A good example is a reliance on
nominalizations, or nouns formed through
the graceless annexation of other parts of
speech. The scholar and writing teacher
Helen Sword calls them “zombie nouns,”
because “they cannibalize active verbs,
Henry James, it is said, wrote the way he
talked: in long, involved sentences.
GRANGER COLLECTION
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suck the lifeblood from adjectives and substitute
abstract entities for human beings.” Writing in
The New York Times, Sword reproduced a passage
from an unnamed social-sciences book; I’ve italicized the zombie nouns. Note also features that
customarily accompany these nouns: excessive use
of prepositions (capitalized), of the weak verb to be
(underlined), and of the passive voice (boldface).
The partial participation OF newcomers is by
no means “disconnected” FROM the practice
OF interest. Furthermore, it is also a dynamic concept. In this sense, peripherality, when
it is enabled, suggests an opening, a way OF
gaining access TO sources FOR understanding
THROUGH growing involvement. The ambiguity inherent IN peripheral participation must
then be connected to issues OF legitimacy, OF
the social organization OF and control OVER resources, if it is to gain its full analytical potential.
Admittedly, some people in the academy talk as
well as write this way, and comparable flim-flammery can be heard in business and government
meetings. But in speech, compared with writing,
the inanity is more obvious.
This is not to say that everybody should write
like Hemingway. But the prose of even the most
literary writers — the good ones, that is — has
an oral quality. William Allen White spent a lot
of time with Henry James and observed that the
novelist “talked, as he wrote, in long involved
sentences with a little murmur — mum-mummum — standing for parentheses, and with all
these rhetorical hooks he seemed to be poking
about in his mind, fumbling through the whole
basket of his conversational vocabulary, to find
the exact word, which he used in talking about
most ordinary matters. He seemed to create
with those parentheses.”
Finally, good writing has good rhythm, which
is why the single best piece of writing advice is to
read your stuff aloud. If it doesn’t scan, revision is
your plan.
All this has long been widely recognized, but a
new psychological study suggests we only knew the
half of it. “The Sound of Intellect,” an article in the
June issue of Psychological Science, reports the results of an experiment in which a group of M.B.A.
candidates at the University of Chicago’s business
school were asked to prepare two brief pitches for
prospective employers, one a written text and one
an audio recording. A random group of people
were asked to judge the pitches on three criteria:
intellect, hiring likelihood, and general impressions. On all three measures, the audio pitches
were judged significantly better.
The most important reason for this result, the
authors propose, is a feature of speech: “variance in
pitch,” which “may reveal the presence of an active
and lively mind” and “can convey enthusiasm, interest, and active deliberation.” And all the while I
thought I was getting that stuff into my scribbling!
But don’t despair, fellow scribes. The authors —
Juliana Schroeder and Nicholas Epley — allow that
their results “do not indicate that it is impossible
for a talented writer to overcome the limitations of
text alone; they indicate only that our M.B.A. students … did not predict that they needed to overcome these limitations and did not do so spontaneously.” (Emphasis added.)
The task, apparently, is to simulate in print a
speaker’s rising and falling pitch. The means of
doing so would seem to be a redoubled attention
to rhythm, including emphasized words (whether
using real or implied italics), rhetorical questions,
maybe an exclamation point here and there, and
even sentence fragments. Like this. It’s worth a try,
if we would endeavor to read as smart as we sound.
Ben Yagoda is a professor of English at the University of Delaware.
Originally published on August 24, 2015
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Parts of Speech
What’s the Matter With ‘Me’?
Resistance to the object pronoun seems to be on the rise
By WILLIAM GERMANO
W
hen did we decide that me was
good constructions. It’s the shallow waters of overungrammatical? Or if not unused I that has me (not I) fussed.
grammatical, then maybe vulgarThere’s something about me that makes people
ly self-promoting?
uncomfortable, and something about I that reas“Sally, who had given the keys
sures. Linguists, who have the technical knowledge
to Jim and I, discovered that she was locked out of
I lack, can describe the problem more precisely.
her office.”
Yet the resistible rise of the first-person singular
“Congratulations from Susan and I on inheriting
pronoun sounds like a social one: Many speakthat time share!”
ers, insecure about grammatical Rules, default to
“Sadly, the carton of tangelos promised to Milwhat sounds formal, and me ain’t sounding formal
dred, Juan, and I never reached Bushwick.”
enough.
The problem is hardly new, and writers on usThe tilt toward the formal-sounding (not to be
age, including Mignon Fogarty (a.k.a. Grammar
confused with the formal) might also explain the
Girl), have gently admonished us to mind our I’s
current enthusiasm for the reflexive pronoun. A
and me’s.
friend recently pointed out
Nonetheless, the resisto me her frustration with
tance to the object pronoun
the emergence of myself
me seems to be on the rise,
where me would be just fine.
at least to judge from what
Her example, which coincione hears from television
dentally involves the notoribroadcasters and well-eduous Sally (see above), reads
cated public speakers.
“They passed the butter
Perhaps we need some
to Sally and myself for our
new mnemonics to help
toast.”
us out. The now antique
The butter, not to mention
expression “between you,
the toast, could simply be
me, and the lamppost” was
passed to me. I don’t think
de facto a reminder that
I’ve seen this as often in stua pronoun introduced by
dent writing as I have heard
between will take an obit in the speech of adults
ject case. Nobody would
who want to sound correct.
say “between you, we, and
And that’s the problem
the lamppost.” Yet one frewith the problem. People
quently hears “between you
want to sound correct, even
and I,” often as a throwif that means putting on
away opener to what proves
what feels like an ill-fitting
not to be much of a confiformal coat to do so.
dence at all. “Between you
For the moment, though,
AP IMAGES
and I, Juan hates tangelos.”
one might think of Gypsy’s
Ethel Merman in character as Mama Rose
That horrible pedantic
Mama Rose, belting out her
in the musical Gypsy
streak in some of us, includsalute to herself (note, not
ing this writer, lurches when
to her, which would point
the subject-case pronoun intrudes itself. And it’s alelsewhere). Think of Rose not just as the ultimate
ways the first person rather than the third that causstage mother but as an insistent usage adviser. It’s
es mischief. You’re not going to hear “Those tangelos
Rose’s turn, she says, and now it’s time for me, for
should have reached Mildred and we, even if Juan
me, for me, for me, for me, for me, for me.
hates them.”
William Germano is dean of humanities at the
I don’t want to wade into the deep waters of
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science.
what makes “Hi, it’s me” or “C’est moi” perfectly
Originally published on August 16, 2016
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Parts of Speech
Make Mine Factitive
Certain verbs entail metamorphosis
O
By LUCY FERRISS
f the many mean tricks I pulled on my
children, a particular favorite (of mine,
not theirs) took place when they popped
into the kitchen and said, “Mommy,
make me an ice-cream sundae!”
“Poof!” I would say, wiggling my fingers. “You’re
an ice-cream sundae!”
The joke relies on one of those slippery Englishlanguage phenomena, wherein the same syntax
can have two different grammatical structures
and hence two meanings. My children wish me to
create (transitive verb) a sundae (direct object) for
them (indirect object). I offer to make (factitive
verb) them (direct object) a sundae (objective complement).
The factitive verb, for language fanatics, is a gas.
The root of the term is the Latin facere, to make
or do. Anything that makes something something
is factitive, and the making can be as concrete as
hammer and nails or as ephemeral as a thought. I
can, for instance, consider the dean an idiot, and
poof! Grammatically, at least, he’s an idiot. I can
make my home a castle; we can elect Senator X
president. Moving on to adjectives as complements,
I can make you beautiful; I can judge my students
wanting. I can even make something something by
using an infinitive: I made him stay home.
More on that last sentence in a second — but
first I’d like to turn to Fiddler on the Roof. Tevye’s
daughters’ opening song, “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” plays on the factitive verb’s double entendre in a memorable way. “Make me a match,”
the girls beg, in much the same way that my kids
would beg for a sundae. To confirm their meaning,
they sing, “Find me a find, catch me a catch” — in
other words, find or catch something for me. But
in the next verse, they sing, “For Papa, make him
a scholar; for Mama, make him rich as a king” —
and here, the make is factitive. “Poof!” they seem to
want to say, “He’s a scholar!”
Underlying this shift in the function of “make”
is a subtle meaning for the girls themselves. Their
opening pleas, “Make me a match,” seems now to
be asking not only for good men, but also for the
girls to be made, themselves, into good matches —
to be matched.
The syntax gets even more slippery when we apply the infinitive, as I did above. Even one of my
grammar gurus, Eugene Moutoux, calls the infinitive following a possibly factitive verb a “gray area”
of grammar. He writes:
In the sentence “See Spot run,” what is being
seen is Spot’s running, which might argue for
Spot run as a subject with infinitive. It’s not really Spot that is the primary focus of the seeing
but Spot’s running. The same thing can be said
for “Let us go.” It’s not so much we who are being
permitted, but our going is being permitted. In
other words, us doesn’t seem as much like a direct object as the subject of an infinitive phrase.
Now, with the sentence “We made him stay
home,” it doesn’t seem like we are forcing his
staying home but that we are forcing him. This
would argue for calling him in this sentence a
direct object.
Does any of this parsing make a difference, in
terms of correct syntax or acceptable style? No.
If I write a hard-boiled western in which Sheriff
Jones says to One-Eyed Sam, “I’ll see you hang,”
the reader is welcome to consider whether Jones’s
mental image is of a transformation — Sam with
his six-shooters being made into Sam hanging —
or merely of Sam’s dangling from a rope. But even
when it doesn’t “matter,” language can be fun to
contemplate. I, for one, enjoy contemplating the
ways in which certain verbs entail metamorphosis, if only for a moment of suspended disbelief.
For those who object to this way of thinking about
verbs — well, I guess I am making myself toast.
Lucy Ferriss is writer in residence at Trinity College, in Hartford, Conn.
Originally published on November 1, 2011
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Parts of Speech
Time Present
When it comes to verb tense, it’s OK to mix it up
BY LUCY FERRISS
N
othing says “start of academic year”
better than early student papers that
get snarled in verbs. Is it “Eliot writes”
or “Eliot wrote”? Is it “I lived in Vermont, which is always frigid in March”
or “I lived in Vermont, which was always frigid in
March”? Is it “The girl who was next to me was
named Stephanie,” or “The girl who was next to me
is named Stephanie”?
Each discipline probably has its own style guide
on verb usage; at the very least, I know that MLA
style and APA style differ on their approaches to
verb tense in referencing research. Whole books
could be — and have been — written on the question of tense alone. The first thorny thicket students find themselves in has to do with critical discussion. Just for fun(!), let’s take Immanuel Kant,
who lived almost three centuries ago; it stands to
reason that everything he thought or argued, he
argued in the past. Indeed, Wikipedia’s Kant entry
uses past tense throughout the section on Kant’s
biography and into the section on his philosophy,
where we read, for example, “Kant defined the Enlightenment as an age shaped by the Latin motto
Sapere aude.” But then things start to slip. Kant’s
work, we read, “reconciled many of the differences
between the rationalist and empiricist traditions
of the 18th century” and “has also been a starting
point for many 20th-century philosophers.”
OK, so all the guys from the 18th century are
dead and some of the 20th-century minds are still
ticking away. But then: “For the sake of morality
and as a ground for reason, Kant asserted, people are justified in believing in God, even though
they could never know God’s presence empirically.” Where, one might ask, did that are come from,
and how does it mesh with that could? Finally, the
Wikipedia entry seems to shift gear entirely: “Kant
defines his theory of perception in his influential
1781 work The Critique of Pure Reason.” But wait!
There’s a last nugget of past tense trailing behind
— “Kant deemed it obvious that we have some objective knowledge of the world” — only a few paragraphs later.
No wonder our undergraduates are confused.
“Write about literature in the present tense,” advises
the MLA style manual. But when are Kant’s writings
literature and when are they historical events?
Generally, we try to distinguish between biography and criticism. The biographical subject (Kant)
lived in the past; everything he thought, said, and
suffered belongs to the completed span of his life.
His work lives on. When we use “Kant” in the
sense of “all things Kantian,” we are actually using
“Kant” as a sort of metonym. We are treating him
(or “it”) as a force or argument that continues to be
present in our lives. Sounds simple. When someone
says, “Mozart was great,” we might want to know
either the circumstances in which we was great
(“He was a great jokester”) or how the greatness of
his music has been compromised; when someone
says, “Mozart is great,” she is expressing a love for
Mozart’s music. Yet in actual writing, as the entry
on Kant demonstrates, the lines between the life
and the work are not so easily drawn, and the use
of present or past is more art than science. Reading the Wikipedia entry on Kant, I don’t experience any “bump” in tense, even though the author
writes the following sentences in close proximity
and long after the biographical summary of Kant’s
life is complete:
Kant asserts that experience is based both
upon the perception of external objects and a
priori knowledge.
n
Kant deemed it obvious that we have some
objective knowledge of the world, such as, say,
Newtonian physics.
n
Judgments are, for Kant, the preconditions of
any thought.
n
Kant believed that all the possible propositions
within Aristotle’s syllogistic logic are equivalent
to all possible judgments.
n
We could spend a long time arguing why each of
these statements demands the verb tense assigned
to it, and why they all differ from student work that
contends, for instance, “In Pride and Prejudice,
Jane Austen pushed us to consider whether marriage was always about material advantage. Is Jane
Austen merely a product of her time?” The longterm solution is the usual one: read, read, read. For
the short term, I find teaching the notion of the
personage as metonym to be useful, though hardly
sufficient.
Lucy Ferriss is writer in residence at Trinity College, in Hartford, Conn.
Originally published on September 19, 2012
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Parts of Speech
Watching Adverbs
Mindlessly deleting them will not improve bad writing
By GEOFF PULLUM
BOB MCGRATH
D
ictionary publishers these days
try to maintain websites that do more
than just advertise books. They offer
word-of-the-day features, blog posts,
English lessons, hints for teachers,
educational technology news, all sorts of things.
Macmillan offers Macmillan Dictionary Blog,
where a January 17, 2013, post on writing asserted
that “adverbs are monsters,” and made an explicit
recommendation:
Try this exercise: Go through a piece of writing,
ideally an essay of your own. Delete all adverbs
and adverbial phrases, all those “surprisingly,”
“interestingly,” “very,” “extremely,” “fortunately,”
“on the other hand,” “almost invariably.” (While
you are at it, also score out those clauses that
frame the content, like “we may consider that,”
“it is likely that,” “there is a possibility that.”)
Question 1: Have you lost any content?
Question 2: Is it easier to read?
Usually the meaning is still exactly the same but
the piece is far easier to read.
I want to hang my head and cry when I see writing advice as boneheadedly misguided as this (and
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unfortunately that’s way too often).
Take a look at the last sentence quoted: “Usually
the meaning is still exactly the same but the piece
is far easier to read.” The underlined words are all
adverbs, so under its author’s advice the sentence
should have read, “The meaning is the same but
the piece is easier to read.”
If adverbs are monsters, and the main point of
the piece is to recommend deleting them all, what
happened here? Either the advice-giver is so stupid
that he believes his advice but didn’t notice his own
four flagrant violations of it, or the advice is so stupid that no advice-giver would dream of applying
it to someone sensible like himself. I don’t see any
other possibilities.
Applying this adverb-erasing recommendation
across the board would be disastrous, in random
ways. In some cases it would cause a spectacular
change of sense: The slogan of the British department-store chain John Lewis, Never Knowingly
Undersold, would become Undersold. Quite often
it would yield vapid slop with the wrong meaning:
Defusing a bomb must be done carefully would become Defusing a bomb must be done; The dog had
been brutally treated would become The dog had
been treated. Sometimes it would create outright
ungrammaticality: A carefully worded letter would
become a worded letter.
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What mindless adverb erasure cannot be trusted to do, though, is improve bad or indifferent
writing.
The post does back off a little when it gets into
detail. It divides adverbs into manner adverbs
(smugly, intelligently, squashily), time adverbs
(soon, often, yesterday), hedges (maybe, possibly,
probably), emphasizers (very, extremely, absolutely), sentence adverbs (however, consequently, funnily [enough]), and finally “extreme horrors like
just and quite,” and proposes that differential levels of forbiddenness apply.
“The time adverbs I allow,” says our guide to better writing, magnanimously. Moreover, “the hedges I forgive, after careful consideration, if the sentence would be untrue without them.” So he would
not necessarily have us replace Earthquakes are
seldom predictable by Earthquakes are predictable.
But manner adverbs, emphasizers, and sentence
adverbs are all to be committed to the flames. “The
sentence adverbs,” we are told, “are wildly overused
by many authors.” (Wildly overused, mark you:
That’s a manner adverb.)
The truth is that nothing as mechanical as abandoning adverbs (or certain subclasses of adverbs)
is going to uniformly improve your prose. Similar advice is handed out elsewhere (by the royally
knighted but linguistically benighted broadcaster Sir Alistair Cooke, for example, and naturally,
by Strunk and White’s toxic little compendium of
misguided maxims); but like the familiar advice
to avoid passive clauses, it is never followed by the
people who recommend following it.
The writers they admire never follow it either.
And I don’t mean just that fine writing with adverbs is possible; I mean that all fine writing in
English has adverbs (just open any work of literature you respect and start reading).
This profoundly silly post ends with a mention
of a science journalist who remarked that “an adverb is for the linguistic dwarf unable to reach for
the correct verb.” The metaphorical equation of
dwarfism with inadequacy seems unpleasant, but
setting that aside, the presupposition is that for
most adverb-plus-verb combinations in English
there is an alternative choice of verb that is synonymous with the combination, and you should
use it. That is flatly and plainly false. You can’t
substitute a synonymous verb for usually walks,
or wildly overused, or boneheadedly misguided,
or rarely participates, or fidgeted incessantly; the
verbs don’t exist.
Do as the advice-giver does, not as he says.
When he needs an adverb, he uses one. You should
too. Decisively, proudly, and fearlessly.
Geoff Pullum is a professor of linguistics at the
University of Edinburgh.
Originally published on February 20, 2013
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Punctuation
BOB MCGRATH
The Comma Sutra
After a comma splice appeared in an essay, epithets followed
By BEN YAGODA
T
he celebrated sage Yogi Berra, referring to the many aphorisms apocryphally attributed to him, once observed, “I
really didn’t say everything I said.” One
of the things he really did say (according
to the reliable Yale Book of Quotations) is, “You can
observe a lot by watching.” I will modify that as follows: “You can learn a lot by just writing.”
Inspiring that thought was a piece I wrote recently for The New York Times, the second of two
on commas. The first installment drew a lot of reaction, but it was as nothing compared with the
second. As I write, it’s the No. 1 most e-mailed story on the Times site for both the past seven days
and the past 30 days; it generated 697 comments,
before comments were closed.
And the main thing I learned was that, improbably, a great many people care a great deal about
commas. Who knew? Getting into the weeds, the
point that elicited probably the biggest reaction is
represented by this reader comment:
You wrote “The weather is great today. However,
it’s supposed to rain tomorrow.” This was cited
as a correct example; however, I was told that
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what is correct is the construction I am using in
this sentence. (“however” after the semi-colon).
Until reading all those comments and getting all
those e-mails, I was actually not aware that anyone ever held that belief. I was enlightened when
I looked up however in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. Lo and behold: It cites
two sources — Strunk and White’s The Elements
of Style and William Zinsser’s How to Write Well
— that counsel against starting sentences with the
word. However, all other cited authorities properly say it’s perfectly OK, as does Merriam-Webster’s
itself. I confess I still don’t understand why anyone
would proscribe this or, even more bafflingly, allow
however after a semicolon but not after a period.
The next-biggest group of comments related to
this sentence of mine: “None are correct.” As one
person said, “Shouldn’t you have written: ‘None IS
correct’, since ‘none’ is supposed to be singular, a
contraction of ‘no one’ or ‘not one’?”
I looked back at my original draft and found I
had indeed written “none is correct.” So the Times
must have changed it to are. But that doesn’t bother me much. In cases where a plural noun is in-
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cluded, such as “none of the members of the club
is coming,” the is sounds pretentious and forced.
I prefer are, and I believe current usage manuals
back me up. When the plural noun is not there but
implied (in my sentence, the phrase “of them” is
elided), I guess I do prefer is.
Since writing the preceding paragraph, I learned
that the Times sent the following reply to people
who complained about “None are correct”:
We appreciate your careful reading, but I have
to inform you that our usage was correct. Here is
the entry from the New York Times stylebook:
None. Despite a widespread assumption that
it stands for not one, the word has been construed as a plural (not any) in most contexts
for centuries. H.W. Fowler’s Dictionary of
Modern English Usage (1926) endorsed the
plural use. Make none plural except when emphasizing the idea of not one or no one — and
then consider using those phrases instead.
Thank you for reading the Times and taking a
moment to share your thoughts.
Moving right along, there was this comment:
My nerdy self loved this article; however, I am
completely perplexed by the one missing comma
that I did not understand — the one not in this
sentence: “He was born in Des Moines, Iowa in
1964.”
Why is a comma necessary after “Iowa”?
One way to answer the question is the becauseI-said-so tack: A comma after Iowa is the universal practice in U.S. publications and publishing,
that’s why. But it’s more complicated than that. My
students really want to leave out that comma, as
do people all over the internet, which is why I included the point in my original article. A reason
for this may be a logical or grammatical flaw in the
convention. However (take that, commenters!), the
flaw is more in the comma before the word Iowa
than the one after it.
That is, the usual logic is to surround with commas nonrestrictive (also referred to as nondefining or nonessential) words, phrases, and clauses.
So I’d write, “My wife, Allison, and my friend Bill
went with me.” Commas before and after Allison
because I have only one wife, and thus the word is
nonrestrictive. No commas before or after Bill because I have many friends, and thus the word is restrictive. But Iowa in this case is restrictive: it tells
us which Des Moines is being referred to. A better example would be a reference to the September
11, 2001, attacks. The year 2001 is restrictive, so
by customary logic should not be preceded or followed by a comma.
But commas are the convention, for better or
worse. And it’s surely the case that if a comma is
put before the state or year, one has to be put after
it as well.
The most surprising group of reactions came
from what I thought of as a completely innocuous
example of a comma splice:
He used to be a moderate, now he’s a card-carrying Tea Partier.
Hoo boy, was I wrong. Apparently, the sentence
was featured on the Drudge Report as an example
of New York Times liberal-socialism, and readers
were urged to excoriate the newspaper and me. (I
say “apparently,” because in order to confirm that I
would actually have to read the Drudge Report.) I
was called many epithets, some of them printable
and a few even spelled correctly.
One of the more measured protests was posted
on my Facebook page by Maggi Cook. She wrote:
r. Yagoda — how about this one: She use to be
M
reasonable, now she is associated with the terrorist OWS. Or this one: I thought my professor
was going to talk about the French Revolution. It
turns out his topic today was about the Socialist
tendencies of the Obama administration.
I honestly didn’t intend to say anything bad
about the Tea Party. Indeed, the example in the
Times didn’t say or imply that Tea Partiers are
horrible or racist or anything other than not
“moderate.” This is the exact position espoused
by the Tea Partier Ted Cruz in his comments after a Texas Republican Senate primary on May
30, 2012: “This race is ground zero in the battle
between the moderate establishment and the conservative tidal wave that’s sweeping this country.”
(Italics added.)
Still, my sentence was published in an editorially liberal newspaper, so I can see how some people
might misinterpret the intent. Consequently I am
going to take Ms. Cook up on her offer! I’ll explain.
The comma post was adapted from my new book,
How to Not Write Bad, to be published in February 2013. And I hereby pledge to change the comma-splice example in the book as follows:
He used to be a moderate, now he’s a card-carrying member of Occupy Wall Street.
Somebody will have to tell me if the Drudge Report approves.
Ben Yagoda is a professor of English at the University of Delaware.
Originally published on June 1, 2012
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Punctuation
Say, ‘What’?
P
BY LUCY FERRISS
unctuating dialogue, for reasons I
fail to understand completely, is one of
the hardest things for my fiction-writing students to master. Autocorrect inserts a capital after any form of so-called
terminal punctuation, so “Are you going out?” he
asked becomes “Are you going out?” He asked.
Certain that the verb accompanying the speaker’s
name is the dialogue tag, many students write, She
laughed, “That’s a funny joke.” Master classes on
the rules, the craft, and the art of punctuating dialogue make some impression, but deeply confused
students often default to abjuring any sort of punctuation: “I think I’ll go out” he said “after I’ve done
the laundry.”
Almost all conventions regarding punctuation
in dialogue rely on common sense. If the quoted
speech is part of the sentence as a whole, the punctuation between it and the dialogue tag should not
be terminal, nor should the first letter of the tag be
capitalized. If the speaker is interrupted, a dash
could go before the quotation mark; if the speaker’s
tag interrupts the speech, dashes should lie outside
punctuation marks. And so on.
But the simplest and most basic mark of punctuation we associate with dialogue receives almost no
scrutiny, even though the basis of the convention is
the hardest to discern. I refer to the comma.
The verb said, for starters, is a transitive verb.
We don’t simply say; we always say something.
Generally, we don’t like to separate transitive verbs
from their objects with commas, any more than
we separate subjects from verbs with commas. You
would not, for instance, write He hit, Bobby or I
steered, my 10-foot catamaran around the shoals
before landing safely in the harbor. Yet the convention of using a comma to initiate a line of quoted
speech has so hardened into a rule that three out
of four undergraduates, by my estimate, will insert
commas before anything in quotes. Thus we get:
Hemingway wrote, “Hills like White Elephants.”
I liked, “The Lottery” better than, “The Ones
Who Walk Away From Omelas.”
Before making, “Castello Cavalcanti” Wes Anderson had never filmed a commercial.
Monet’s, “Impression Sunrise” is one of his
most famous paintings.
It’s easy enough, I suppose, to instruct stu-
dents to use commas before quoted speech and
not before titles. But handing them a rule doesn’t
provide a rationale. Moreover, we can all think
of instances of quoted speech that don’t call for
commas.
He’s the kind of guy who says “Whatever” to
whatever you propose.
You say “Come home this minute” every time I
ask if I can stay out late.
The judgment call regarding such commas is illustrated in this very post. In my first paragraph, I
followed the introductory word write with a comma; in the fourth paragraph, I left it without. I
made this apparently inconsistent choice instinctively, and my editor did not change it. James Harbeck, who writes the blog Sesquiotica, expresses
the rationale for comma use in dialogue sensitively
if not succinctly:
When the quoted material is within a narrative frame — even if it’s the only thing in the
narrative frame — and we’re being taken to
the scene, as it were, a comma is generally
used. But when the quoted material is being
treated as an instance of an utterance of that
phrase, and the verb is the main thing rather
than being an entrance point to dialogue (in
other words, when the quoted material is truly the complement of the verb rather than an
act of locution introduced), a comma is not
called for.
You can find illustrative examples in Harbeck’s
“Commas Before Quotes” post. The essential element here, I think — and the one I try to impress
on students, if they’re not too glazed-eyed to listen — is that dialogue tag words (said, shouted, whisper, write, and so on) can take us to the
scene. The comma is the curtain parting, letting the drama emerge. If the descriptive quality
of the verb takes precedence over the dramatic
emergence of the speech, the comma is a distraction and a hindrance.
It’s a long explication, not a short rule. But
sometimes the long way around is the only way in.
Lucy Ferriss is writer in residence at Trinity College, in Hartford, Conn.
Originally published on December 2, 2013
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Punctuation
Dashing
Through
Dashes can lose their effectiveness
— if they’re overused
By ANNE CURZAN
JONATHAN TWINGLEY
FOR THE CHRONICLE
O
nce you start using the dash in your
writing, it can be hard to stop. I’m
talking about the em-dash here —
that punctuation mark that is so
helpful at linking phrases and clauses
that don’t seem well served by a comma, semi-colon, or colon.
I started wondering the other day whether —
and how badly — one can misuse the dash. Most
style guides provide a good amount of leeway in
terms of how the dash can function — it can function like a colon (as it did right there), parentheses
(as it did in the first sentence of this paragraph), or
a comma (as it did in the second sentence of this
post). I sometimes see the dash used in place of a
semi-colon — and while that use strikes me as a bit
less ideal, I am reluctant to call it wrong.
This week I read a sentence in a memo that had
two em-dashes in it, connecting three clauses sequentially, and that seems to me to stretch the
dash beyond effective usage. The sentence worked
along these lines:
The retreat will fall on the last Friday in June,
which may not work for all faculty — but this
will not be the only opportunity for faculty to
discuss the curricular reforms — we’ll hold another full faculty meeting to discuss the curriculum early in September.
I felt the urge to replace the second dash with a
period — or perhaps a semicolon, but the period
seemed like a better idea.
The dash has a certain flair to it in its informality and its versatility. It makes a parenthetical a bit
more prominent — a bit less parenthetical — than
parentheses. It adds more sentential importance
to an additional thought or an afterthought than a
comma can do.
This blog post, though, may highlight one way
we as writers can start to make the dash less effective — by overusing it. As an editor I have
started to create informal rules about the emdash, such as no more than two sentences per
paragraph with dashes — and more ideally only
one per paragraph. And certainly you don’t get to
use the em-dash in every sentence in a paragraph
— even if arguably every sentence legitimately
could take a dash.
It is disconcerting to be violating this rule so flagrantly in this post. And I would guess that at this
point, you as a reader are tired of seeing the dash
here — and perhaps distracted by its frequent appearance. Ideally punctuation should not be distracting. It should do its work organizing sentences
on the page more subtly.
Is overuse misuse? I’m not ready to say that. But
overuse can certainly deprive the dash of its punctuational punch.
Anne Curzan is a professor of English at the
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Originally published on May 16, 2016
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Spelling
COURTESY OF BBC
Being an Apostrophe
An apostrophe is not a punctuation mark; it’s a silent letter
By GEOFF PULLUM
A
iputative grammar outrage blew up a
week ago in Britain when the Conservative-dominated Mid Devon District
Council announced plans to “abolish
the apostrophe.” The signs for Beck’s
Square, Blundell’s Avenue, and St. George’s Well
would under the new policy say Becks Square,
Blundells Avenue, and St. Georges Well. Indeed,
the council has been using apostrophe-free signs
for years, like other districts (the pictured sign for
Baker’s View is in neighboring Teignbridge district). The proposal was simply to make the tacit
policy official.
But out came the usual suspects to froth and
fulminate. A spokesman for the Plain English Society, Steve Jenner, launched straight into a slippery-slope argument (as if nothing had ever been
written on fallacies or critical thinking): “It’s nonsense,” he raged; “Where’s it going to stop? Are
we going to declare war on commas, outlaw full
stops?”
Within about three working days the media outcry had bullied the Mid Devon council into reversing itself.
What interested me, however, was not the policy
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or the abandonment of it but the many references
to “punctuation” in the overheated news coverage. The apostrophe is not a punctuation mark. It
doesn’t punctuate. Punctuation marks are placed
between units (sentences, clauses, phrases, words,
morphemes) to signal structure, boundaries, or
pauses. The apostrophe appears within words. It’s
a 27th letter of the alphabet. This issue concerns
spelling.
Several other characters have joined the 26 letters as characters that appear in written words:
the @-sign in email addresses; “+” and “#” in the
programming language names C++ and C#; and of
course one punctuation mark that serves ambiguously as a letter, in the typographically unpleasant
corporate name Yahoo! The apostrophe just has a
longer history than these. It occurs in:
1. inflectionally negated auxiliary verbs bearing
the n’t suffix (yes, it’s a suffix: see the paper “Cliticization vs. Inflection: English N’T,” by Arnold
Zwicky and me in Language, Vol. 59 [1983], pp.
502-513);
2. the clitic forms of certain auxiliaries (’d for
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had and would, ’ll for will, ’m for am, ’re for are,
’s for is and has, and ’ve for tensed have; see the
same paper);
3. proper names such as O’Brien or D’Arcy;
4. various other words originating as abbreviations or foreign names, like ’60s, c’mon, e’en,
ne’er-do-well, o’clock, rock ’n’ roll, etc.;
5. the irregular plurals of certain unusual
nouns (A’s and B’s, 3’s and 4’s, I’s and me’s); and
above all
6. the genitive forms of nouns (the personal pronouns are exceptional nouns with the irregular
apostrophe-free genitive forms her, his, its, my,
our, their, whose, and your; the pompous-style
indefinite pronoun one, as in One should recuse
oneself, is an exception to the exception, with a
regular genitive, one’s).
All of this concerns the famously irregular and
sometimes insane English orthography. Apostrophes have no punctuation role. (True, a half-page
about them on Page 1,763 of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language does fall in the chapter on punctuation, faute de mieux; but it doesn’t
disagree with what I said above.) As usual, the people pothering on about grammar errors don’t know
what they’re pothering about.
What of the redundancy that the Mid Devon
council seemed to imply? Well, the apostrophe
does have the striking peculiarity of lacking any
corresponding pronunciation. While e and k and g
and h and others are sometimes silent, the letter ’
is always silent. Hence genitives (singular and plural) are phonetically identical to regular plurals:
Box has plural boxes, genitive singular box’s, and
genitive plural boxes’, all pronounced the same. Yet
hearers aren’t confused.
Google completely ignores the 27th letter unless
it’s inside quotation marks. The search pattern tuition fee’s will induce Google to show you millions
of correctly spelled pages on tuition fees. You have
to type “tuition fee’s” into the box to see the few
thousand cases of people illiterately spelling the
plural with an apostrophe. (The top hit is a payment page for a business academy.)
I always use the apostrophe in the standard way,
even when texting; I’m a conservative. But human
reading abilities are astonishingly robust under
even radical disruption of spelling. (You wlll in all
likleihood have asobtulely no dfficuitly in redaing
tihs parnetheitcal rmaerk.) The level of harmful
confusion attendant on dropping all apostrophes
from written English would be zero.
I’m not going to advocate scrapping it. I’m not a
revolutionary. But I wouldn’t shed a tear for it.
Geoff Pullum is a professor of linguistics at the
University of Edinburgh.
Originally published on March 22, 2013
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25
Spelling
Adviser Advisory
Which spelling to use may depend on alphabetical order
By ALLAN METCALF
T
he mark of a real journalist, I learned
long ago, is knowing the proper spelling
of adviser.
It stands out because until stepping
into journalism, most neophytes have
learned the other spelling. In high school, clubs
and activities have advisors. In college, more of the
same, usually with academic progress monitored
by a faculty advisor.
Against that background, adviser seems, er, a
little undignified. But it’s an ironclad rule in journalism. The entry for the word in The Associated
Press Stylebook says it flatly :
adviser Not advisor.
How did this come about? What motivated the
AP to go against the grain of most official titles?
I think I know. It’s very simple: In the alphabet, e
comes before o.
It goes like this: Suppose you’re making a dictionary and you
discover that
both adviser
and advisor
have been used
for a long time.
In the Oxford
English Dictionary, you
find the earliest example of
adviser (with
its present-day
meaning) dated 1575, advisor, 1589.
Though
you’d like to
give just one
proper spelling for each
word, the evidence says both are proper, so you list
them both. But you can’t list them simultaneously,
one on top of the other. So what’s the logical thing
to do? Put them in alphabetical order. And that
makes adviser always first.
OK, now you’re a journalist. Lexicographers may
have to allow multiple spellings for a word, but
journalists can’t. To avoid distracting your readers,
you need a uniform style. And so you say that the
first spelling in a dictionary is the one to use, even
if the others are OK.
I think that’s how the AP choice of adviser came
into being. Simple as that. But once entrenched, it
has become a shibboleth for journalists. AP’s online “Ask the Editor” includes this 2012 exchange
from Portland, Ore.:
Q. Do you have any plans to revisit “adviser”
as preferred over “advisor”? Webster’s New
World College Dictionary Fourth Edition
lists “advisor” first and gives “adviser” as second choice. Also, the -or spelling seems to be
widely preferred outside of the journalism
world, so a lot of copy comes to us with “advisor” and must be changed (not to mention the
issue of official job titles also tending toward
-or). Seems like the tide is turning toward the
-or spelling.
A. AP is sticking with adviser. We use the “or”
spelling if it’s in a formal title or a recognized
certification.
I think it also has to do with the journalist’s
healthy skepticism about the prestige of official
titles. Come on, an adviser is just somebody who
gives advice, not specially qualified by virtue of
being called an advisor. You can rub it in each
time you write the word and at the same time
show that your hands are clean; it’s just the way
we journalists have to write it.
Allan Metcalf is a professor of English at MacMurray College and executive secretary of the
American Dialect Society.
Originally published on July 11, 2016
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Exercises for the Classroom
JEROME CORGIER FOR THE CHRONICLE
20 Things Students Say Help Them Learn
Undergraduates give their professors and themselves some advice
By ANNE CURZAN
N
ear the end of August, the 2014
Business Insider article “10 Things Every College Professor Hates” started
circulating on Facebook again. I had
just finished the syllabus for my introductory English linguistics class at the University
of Michigan at Ann Arbor and was feeling excited
to be headed back into the classroom. Yet here was
this article, which felt so negative. It didn’t come
across as entirely respectful of all that students
bring to the table. And the piece, aimed at students
about “interacting with your professor or teaching
assistant,” seemed to give more attention to pleasing the professor than to real learning.
I wondered: What would happen if you asked
undergraduate students not about how to please
the professor but about what promotes good
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t h e c h ro n ic l e o f h ig h e r e duc a t io n learning, for all of us, together, as participants in
a learning community? I talked it over with the
graduate-student instructor working with me, and
we decided to do just that in the first discussion
sections for the year. What better way to think together about what kind of learning community we
wanted to build?
So that first Friday students read and discussed
the Business Insider article, and then we asked
them to create lists: (a) What students can do to
promote good learning; and (b) What instructors
can do to promote good learning. Here’s what students had to say, to each other and to me and my
graduate assistant.*
* Many thanks to all the students who also offered suggestions
on a draft of this post.
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10 Things Students Can Do to Promote Good
Learning
1. Expect to learn every day. That’s on you.
Don’t worry so much about whether you’re doing enough to get a good grade — focus instead
on what you are learning and what you want to
learn. If you’re doing that, the “good grade” will
often follow. (Not always, but often — we want
to be honest about that! But the same is true if
you’re just focused on getting a good grade. … )
2. Feel empowered to — and make the effort
to — participate. Trust that other students and
your instructor care about what you have to say.
(And see No. 4 for how to help out here.) Be willing to be vulnerable and open in discussions, because that’s how learning happens.
3. Ask questions. Ask questions. Ask questions.
(And while we’re on this topic, don’t disparage
other people for asking their questions.)
4. Listen to one another. And please don’t distract other people. If for some reason you have
decided not to pay attention, don’t make it a
group thing!
5. Come prepared for class. This means leaving
yourself time to get assignments done, which
much of the time means getting started earlier
than the night before, which means being organized, which means probably getting a planner.
6. Acknowledge when you’re falling behind or
need help. And then get help immediately! It
will just spiral if you wait. (If that hasn’t happened to you yet, trust us on this one.)
7. Go to office hours. Even if you don’t have questions or need help, go just to make a connection with your professors. They sit in their office
waiting to talk to students about the subject
they’re so passionate about!
8. Know what you need, emotionally and physically, to succeed. Allow yourself to make mistakes. And remember that learning can be uncomfortable (and we’re not talking about the uncomfortable classroom chairs).
9. Talk to classmates you don’t know and try to
support other students. That means sometimes
just taking the time to introduce yourself to a
student you don’t know who is sitting next to you.
10. Remember that your instructor is a human
too.
10 Things Instructors Can Do to Promote Good
Learning
1. Know that it’s OK to humanize yourself (e.g.,
it’s OK if you’re having a rough day — we get it).
2. Know students’ names. We get that this is
hard if it is a big class, but it matters.
3. Know who students are (e.g., Are some of
us shy in class? Do we work or play sports or
play in bands or lead extracurricular groups
or sing or dance or juggle parenting and
school or a hundred other things? Why did we
decide to take this course? What do we hope
to learn?).
4. Assume students want to be there and are
prepared.
5. Create and foster mutual respect in the classroom. And really, doing No. 4 is a big part of
No. 5. Well, actually most of this list supports
this one.
6. Recognize that sometimes life can get in the
way of learning for students, so take the time to
diagnose the problem (e.g., if a student is having
trouble staying awake in class, it could be because they had to work overtime last night, not
because they were out partying).
7. Hold all students to the same rigorous expectations.
8. Refrain from interrupting students to get a
point across. We know that sometimes one of us
can get long-winded and you may need to redirect; but we try not to interrupt you and it’s really nice when you don’t interrupt us.
9. Please don’t feel you need to comment all the
time in a full-class discussion. Sometimes we
need you to guide the discussion, and sometimes
we really don’t need you every turn.
10. Listen to what students have to say.
I am so glad we took this chance to listen to
what students had to say. There are heaps of
wisdom here.
Of course, a different group of students would
create a different list, and that’s great. The point
is that by talking together, and listening, the students, the graduate-student instructor, and I now
have this framework to think about and work to
create the kind of learning community we want
to be.
Originally published on October 11, 2016
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Exercises for the Classroom
How Dangerous
Are Danglers?
Creating intentionally funny danglers helps students avoid them
By ANNE CURZAN
I
don’t remember many grammar lessons
from junior high school, but for whatever reason, one sentence from the lesson about dangling and misplaced modifiers has stuck with
me. Here’s the sentence: “Clinging to the side
of the aquarium, Mary saw a starfish.” Poor Mary!
It is exhausting to have to cling to the side of an
aquarium that way.
Now, of course, if we heard this sentence, we
would probably assume it was the starfish clinging to the side of the aquarium, as this is the most
logical and sensible interpretation. But if we look
closely at the structure of the sentence, the participial phrase “clinging to the side of the aquarium”
modifies “Mary” — if we work from the assumption that participles and other modifiers sit next to
what they modify. So, this sentence could be “fixed”
with alternate versions such as “Clinging to the
side of the aquarium, the starfish stared at Mary,”
or “Mary saw the starfish clinging to the side of the
aquarium.”
I used this example last week in my “Grammar
Boot Camp” course as a way to introduce dangling
participles/modifiers, or “danglers,” as Bryan Garner calls them. Given our ability to interpret most
danglers in spoken language without too much effort (if we even notice them), I think students were
expecting me to say that we don’t need to worry
much about them as writers either. But, in fact,
the advice to avoid danglers in writing is generally
good advice.
The point of taking a critical and questioning approach to prescriptive usage rules is to determine
which ones are worth following because they are
helpful in creating clearer, less ambiguous, and/or
more aesthetically pleasing prose; which ones are
worth following at least some of the time because
they are shibboleths that may get our writing (and
us) judged as not good enough; and which ones are
not worth following because they are out of date,
not widely held or known, etc. I think the advice
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t h e c h ro n ic l e o f h ig h e r e duc a t io n about avoiding danglers falls into the first category. Writing cannot tolerate as much ambiguity as
speech because there is less context, and we are not
there to clarify if need be; putting modifiers next
to the noun phrase they modify makes things easier and clearer for readers. And avoids unintended
humor.
I asked students to create some intentionally
funny danglers, and here are three where the modifier is “misplaced” (i.e., the intended noun phrase
is in the sentence but not next to the modifier):
Oozing slowly across the dish, Kevin watched
the egg yolk.
Gasping for his last breath, the professor killed
the cockroach.
Grooming each other, my professor and I saw
the kittens.
Other examples contained modifiers that were
“dangling” in the sense that they referred to the
speaker/writer, who does not appear as a noun
phrase in the sentence. Consider:
Swimming through the water, the goggles
fogged up.
Rushing to submit my homework on time, my
computer crashed.
Another example wasn’t especially funny (the
students pointed out that being funny on demand
is a big ask, which is a completely fair point!), but
it raises a key question about when a dangler stops
dangling:
Reviewing the final essay, it became apparent
students had not studied.
Given the existential it, we as readers know that
the participial phrase “reviewing the final essay” is
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modifying something else: probably the speaker/
writer or some understood group of people who are
reviewing the students’ final essays. These danglers
tend to feel more OK because they come closer to
the set of “acceptable danglers,” sometimes called
“disguised conjunctions.”
With participles such as considering, assuming,
given, regarding, owing (to), speaking (of), and a
few others, editors tend to allow the participial
phrase to function adverbially, modifying the entire sentence. For example:
Considering the danger, she is lucky to have
gotten out alive.
Even taking all these factors into account, a
team cannot win without strong defense.
H.W. Fowler raises the interesting question of
when this kind of participle becomes acceptable as
a “disguised conjunction/preposition.” How would
we know? He uses the example of referring to. He
compares these two openings to a sentence:
Referring to your letter, you do not state …
Referring to your letter, I find that you do not
state …
To start to answer that question, I went to the
academic section of the Corpus of Contemporary
American English and found almost all instances
of sentence-initial “referring to … ” have the relevant noun right after the phrase (e.g., “Referring
to X, the author argues … ”). But there are certainly exceptions, such as: “Referring to Figure 2, the
presence of the safety provisions shifts the demand
curve up.” So usage suggests that editors, at least,
continue to see referring to as a participial modifier, requiring writers to juxtapose a noun phrase
for it to modify. But it is certainly not confusing to
write “Referring to Figure 2, the data … ” Nor is it
ungrammatical.
In Bryan Garner’s discussion of danglers in Garner’s Modern English Usage, I was struck by the
line: “Most danglers are ungrammatical.” This
statement suggests that if a participial phrase at
the beginning of the sentence is not followed by the
noun phrase it is supposed to modify, the sentence
is ungrammatical. But let’s think about what “ungrammatical” means, at least to linguists. When we
encounter most of these sentences with danglers,
do we understand them? Does our grammar, in the
descriptive sense, allow participial phrases (and
other modifiers) to be separated from the noun
phrase they modify? Clearly the answer is yes.
Anne Curzan is a professor of English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Originally published on February 20, 2017
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Exercises for the Classroom
Labeling Words
Students discuss which usages they would mark as offensive
By ANNE CURZAN
O
f course, dictionaries are very human
products, specific to a time, a place,
and a cultural moment, as well as to
that dictionary’s editors’ philosophy.
The big standard dictionaries that
we now take for granted are remarkable achievements, meticulous in their compilation and revision; and we turn to them as authorities on words
with good reason. But they involve human decisions at every turn.
Easy enough to say, but what does this really mean? To bring the point home to students in
a very real way, I have found it effective to recreate some of the decisions dictionary editors must
make. And one of the most accessible entrées I
have found is usage labels.
Every dictionary has its own set of usage labels.
The American Heritage dictionaries, as one example, use: Nonstandard, Offensive, Vulgar, Derogatory, Slang, Informal, and Usage Problem. Before
we start the exercise itself, students and I often
have productive conversations about the difference
between vulgar and offensive, informal and slang,
using the descriptions in American Heritage as our
guide.
Then it’s time to apply these labels. I usually select 10 to 12 words that do or reasonably could
have usage labels and reproduce their definitions
on a handout with blanks in every place where
there could be a usage label. For instance:
sleazebag n.
A sleazy person.
whore n. 1.
A prostitute.
2.
A person considered sexually promiscuous. 3.
A person
considered as having compromised principles
for personal gain.
I eavesdrop as students work through in pairs
what labels they think are most appropriate. Students are usually asking just the right questions:
What are the criteria? Is this word always offensive? Is this word rebellious in a slangy kind of way
or just informal? And so on. (Last year, as I walked
around the room, I also learned that some students
didn’t realize what prick referred to before it referred to a person.)
We then go through the list together, and I share
what usage labels the dictionary editors of whatever dictionary we’re using included for each entry.
Suddenly the editors’ decisions come under a different kind of scrutiny — and are sometimes challenged.
For example, in the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
(2011), not one of the definitions of whore has a
usage label. Many students disagree with this decision; they opted for offensive for at least some of
the definitions.
If we so choose, we can then check the online
version of the dictionary, where it turns out that
the editors have added Often offensive for the second definition.
Has something changed radically between 2011
and 2015? Probably not. Was the word whore often offensive in 2011, when the print version came
out? Yes.
As this entry makes clear, dictionary editors revisit earlier decisions just like most of the rest of us
and can change their minds — made all the easier
and more efficient now that many dictionaries are
available and regularly updated online. (Interestingly, slut similarly had no usage labels in the print
edition from 2011 but now has Often offensive for
its primary definition of “A person considered to be
sexually promiscuous.”)
If students never look at a dictionary entry quite
the same way again, the activity has done its job.
I hope students will continue to see standard dictionaries as invaluable resources for information
about words’ pronunciations, definitions, etymologies, and more — as fully authoritative, but in a
very human way.
And if some of you reading this realize that
perhaps you haven’t always been including
dictionaries in your references and decide to
change your ways, it will be a happy byproduct.
We will be giving dictionary editors more of the
credit they’re due and will have lowered the pedestal on which we often put dictionaries one responsible notch.
Anne Curzan is a professor of English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Originally published on February 25, 2015
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Exercises for the Classroom
JOYCE HESSELBERTH FOR THE CHRONICLE
Trying to Write the Mighty Line
Analyzing poetic forms helps students hear the music inherent in English
By LUCY FERRISS
F
or years, now, I’ve taught a mixedgenre “Introduction to Creative Writing”
course with a very specific poetry component. Each student in the class must
choose a poetic form he or she loves; I
suggest two dozen of them, and leave books explicating several dozen other choices on the shelf
outside my office. Each student gives a short presentation on their chosen form — its provenance,
history, development, parameters, and best-known
practitioners. They recite from memory at least 12
lines of a poem written in that form. Finally, they
write a poem in that form for class critique.
This unit gets the highest praise and deepest
criticism from students in the class. Invariably, on
student evaluations, some student recommends
(usually in ALL CAPS) that the unit be removed
as tedious and too hard. Almost always, though,
at least one student reports something along the
lines of this semester’s note, that “This assignment
… was the first time a professor has challenged me
to reach out of my comfort zone … yet my favorite
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piece of work is the octave I wrote.”
My challenge, each year, is to tune students’ ears
to the accentual language they speak. English is
a strongly accented language. We inherited verse
initially from Greek and Roman poets, whose long
and short syllables created the music of the (often sung) poetry. But we don’t lengthen syllables
in English so much as we stress them, pronouncing the second syllable of a word like believe louder
than the first. Very early English poetry was not
unlike hip-hop today, in that it paid attention only
to the stresses in the line and more or less chanted the lines so each foot, regardless of syllables,
had the same tempo. Later, we began adding in the
nonaccented syllables, so the “music,” if you will,
emerged from the tantalizing pattern of stress to
nonstress. Thus the iamb, the anapest, the dactyl,
the troche, and so on. As Mark Liberman put it on
the blog Language Log, in English, “metrics is applied phonology.”
Not all students choose to write in forms that
feature meter, but some do, and for them, I find
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that hearing the stress patterns inherent in the
language they speak has become increasingly difficult. I once heard the renowned contemporary formalist Marilyn Hacker say that if she saw a student
mentally counting stresses on her fingers, she knew
she had the beginnings of a poet. I would be loath
to apply that standard now. One student recently
chose to write in blank verse. “Marlowe’s mighty
line” and Shakespeare’s staple for all his plays,
blank verse eschews rhyme but cleaves to a mostly
iambic pentameter pattern, whose perhaps apocryphal justification is that the iamb (lub-DUB)
echoes the heartbeat, and the five-meter line is
about the length of a human breath. Examples are
almost countless:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun
(Shakespeare)
You stars that reign’d at my nativity (Marlowe)
It little profits that an idle king (Tennyson)
Each night at eight my neighbor hacks and
spits (John Canaday)
When I see birches bend to left and right
(Frost)
I emailed her. I haven’t heard from her.
(Marilyn Hacker)
My student, like most others in the class, had
been taught to count syllables (10 to a line) in order to “calculate” iambic pentameter, just as she
had been taught to count syllables in order to write
haiku — a favorite of high-school poetry-writing
exercises because of the form’s short length, but
also a form that translates with difficulty from the
linguistic structures of Japanese. Syllable-counting is useless in trying to achieve musicality in English, and even on its own terms, the exercise fails
because (given the propensity of spoken English
to “swallow” many syllables) students fail to count,
say, the -en or -ing endings of many words.
But in earlier times, I was able to sit with students, read lines aloud, ask them to note the stresses they heard, and establish where there was (or
was not) some sort of metrical pattern. With my
blank-verse student, we read her lines — lurching combinations of anapests, dactyls, and iambs,
with as many as six and as few as three feet to a
line — aloud over and over, and she could not hear
what was loud and what was soft. Discouraged, she
asked how she might learn where the accents lay in
words or phrases she wanted to use. I pointed out
that, while one-syllable words derived their stress
from syntax, any time she went to look up the pronunciation of a word with more than one syllable,
the dictionary would show her where the stresses
lay. “But I would never look in a dictionary to pronounce a word,” she said.
“If you didn’t know the word,” I said, “how else
would you learn to pronounce it?”
“I go to Google translate,” she said, “and they say
the word for me. But I don’t hear the stress.”
I sort of threw up my hands at that point. A halfhour later, a poet who had passed earlier by my office
door stuck her head in. “I CANnot WAIT for CLASSes TO be DONE,” she said, with a knowing grin.
At the risk of becoming one of those handwringing old-timers, I wonder if the ways in which
our text-based language and its oral counterpart are
operating today are affecting our ability to hear the
music inherent in English. If you are a high-school
teacher reading this, I’d like at least to ask you to
stop telling students to count syllables. Have them
listen, instead. They could start by listening to a recording on YouTube of Dylan Thomas reading his
poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”
Lucy Ferriss is writer in residence at Trinity College, in Connecticut.
Originally published on May 22, 2016
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Exercises for the Classroom
*
Permission to
Footnote
Scrutinizing other writers’ footnotes opens
students’ eyes to their many functions
By ANNE CURZAN
I
t’s been 17 years since my realization that
I was hoarding footnotes. I was using plenty of footnotes in my own academic work: I
had been doing that since graduate school.
But I was withholding footnotes from undergraduates.
Not that I was actively forbidding undergraduate students from inserting footnotes into their
essays. But I wasn’t teaching them how to do it
either, which meant that their essays included
exactly zero footnotes.
I was teaching a senior seminar at the time of
the realization. Due to the departmental goals
for the seminar, the writing assignments for the
entire course built toward a final long seminar
paper. I decided to use weekly short written responses to hone two academic skills: incorporating and responding to the arguments of other
scholars, and using footnotes effectively. So for
these weekly one-page responses to readings,
students were required to incorporate two quotes
from the readings and at least one footnote.
If students had thought about footnotes at all,
most of them considered them a citation device
— as they used to be before almost all academic
style guidelines moved to parenthetical references. “So then what goes into the footnotes?” students logically asked.
Suddenly, together we were scrutinizing the
footnotes of the book chapters and articles we
were reading as part of class discussion. We
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found definitions of terms and justifications for
using one term over another, historical background, explanations of more-obscure references, references to additional resources, and sometimes really interesting but somewhat tangential information. Students started to use these
models for their own footnotes, and they were
hooked.
Why? Because footnotes are useful. For example, sometimes as writers we discover some interesting fact or connection that we really want
to share with readers. As we draft the essay or
chapter (or whatever it is), we realize at some
point that this fact or connection is not fully relevant to the point we are making in a particular
paragraph. But we like it too much to lose it entirely. The solution: a footnote.
Undergraduate writers face exactly the same conundrum sometimes, but without access to footnotes they may see only two choices: include this
fascinating bit and accept that it makes the paragraph work less well; or omit it and lose the chance
to share this potentially engaging piece of knowledge. If students opt for the former, their instructor may then criticize the inclusion of tangential
information, no matter how interesting it is.
Or at times a student will spend a lot of space
in the main text of an argument-based essay
explaining a historical event or providing background on how a piece of technology works. We
as instructors may encourage the student not
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to get bogged down in background and foreground the argument. If the student is concerned readers may need the background or explanation, they are caught between their sense
of their audience’s needs and ours. The solution: a footnote.
Why, then, aren’t we teaching first-year undergraduate writers to use footnotes? Why not add
this useful device to their writing toolbox as they
navigate the transition from high-school to college
writing?
Microsoft Word and other word-processing programs now make inserting footnotes into a text
incredibly easy. And if we’re honest about it, footnotes can make any piece of writing look more
academic, more sophisticated — and maybe even
smarter. I think that matters. If we’re trying to
help undergraduate writers enter the scholarly discourse, let’s allow their writing to look even more
like academic writing.
There are other benefits too. In my experience,
everything that helps student writers invest in
a piece of writing (e.g., giving students choices
so that they can write about questions they care
about, allowing students to use footnotes so that
they are engaged with how the writing looks on
the page) makes for better writing. In addition,
when any of us as writers sorts through what information belongs in the main text and what infor-
mation belongs in a footnote, as well as what terms
or ideas might benefit from a footnote with more
explanation, it often encourages us to organize arguments and evidence more effectively.*
I started teaching footnotes with seniors 17
years ago, and I quickly realized that students
shouldn’t have had to wait three full years of college for permission to footnote. In my experience,
undergraduate writers at all levels appreciate the
gift of the footnote, as well as detailed discussions
about how to use the footnote well (including how
not to overuse it). And their writing sometimes
jumps in quality as a result.
For all these reasons, I have gone from hoarding to sharing footnotes. There are plenty to go
around.
* Footnotes also occasionally figure in my revision process —
and I talk with students about this as well. When I’m working
on a draft and realize that some information is too tangential
or minor or otherwise unnecessary in the main text, but I’m too
fond of the material to let it go entirely, I will first move it into a
footnote. By the next round of revision, I sometimes have managed to get enough distance from the footnote that I can simply
cut it; I just needed to let go of the material more slowly than
slashing it in the first round. (For the record, this paragraph was
in the main text for a while. Then I moved it here. Give me a few
more days, and I might delete it entirely.)
Anne Curzan is a professor of English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Originally published on February 15, 2015
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Exercises for the Classroom
A Challenge Centered
Around Usage
Students, state your new composition rule
By ALLAN METCALF
F
or a Lingua Franca post of mine that
centered around the name of a dog in a
movie, the very first comment centered
around neither the dog nor the movie,
but the phrase “centered around” itself.
The commenter, “Earshape,” wrote: “I do not expect someone careful about language to say CENTERED AROUND.”
Why not?
I chose “centered around” rather than the alternative “centered on” because the movie did not always focus directly on the dog. Rather, the dog was
the center of things going on around it. Officer, my
poetic license is up to date.
But to find out why a careful language person
should be expected to avoid “centered around,”
let’s turn to Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage, the trustworthy guide
not only to actual usage but to the history of
critical comments on usage. Like the Congressional Budget Office, it’s nonpartisan; it simply
presents the facts.
And the facts are that until the 1920s, nobody
complained about “center around.” Then, some
as-yet-unidentified maven started the ball rolling
by declaring that “center around” is illogical. Others picked up this stricture, and soon it spread like
a computer virus through the usage handbooks,
with the warning that “some people” consider it illogical.
What’s so illogical about “centered about”? Well,
the logic is complicated, and it’s a matter of debate.
But surprise! This post is not about the logic or
illogic of “center around.” Rather, it’s to describe a
classroom exercise that takes “center around” as a
model.
So please, don’t waste your hammer and tongs
on the logic of “center around.” Instead, take this
opportunity to forge a brand-new usage rule that
will pointlessly vex students in English composition classes, and writers for publications, for generations to come.
To do this exercise:
State your new rule,
explain its logic, and
n give an example of a sentence that violates the
rule, and show how to correct it.
n
n
The rule has to be a brand new one, not announced in any previous usage manual, but — and
this is the hard part — it has to look venerable. Nobody is going to pay attention to a rule that looks
new and arbitrary and idiosyncratic. No, you want
a rule that appears to have been followed by careful writers all along, while being misused or ignored by careless writers.
In other words, it should be like “center around.”
You need to find something people frequently say
or write, show its illogic, and insist on its eradication from good writing. And don’t worry, you can
find logic to approve or condemn any usage. Language is conventional, not logical.
Everyone has pet peeves about language, but
most are too obviously just pet peeves about vocabulary. The annual list from Lake Superior State
University of words that should be banished is an
example of what not to do for this exercise. It’s too
simple and obvious to say we shouldn’t say “amazing,” “shared sacrifice,” “man cave,” or “thank you
in advance,” to take examples from the 2012 Lake
Superior State list. No, it should be a matter of
grammar, like the question of which preposition to
use with the verb “center.”
Allan Metcalf is a professor of English at MacMurray College and executive secretary of the
American Dialect Society.
Originally published on October 3, 2012
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Language History
BOB MCGRATH
You Guys!
Credit Guy Fawkes for this common form of address
By ALLAN METCALF
G
uy Fawkes didn’t succeed in his terrorist plot four centuries ago. And the
Guy Fawkes masks worn by Occupy
Wall Street protesters in October 2011
were unlikely to terrorize the 1 percent. But Guy has succeeded beyond a doubt in one
thing: changing the English language.
We talk about him all the time. He’s the guy of
you guys.
Changing the language wasn’t part of his plot.
But if it weren’t for his attempt to blow up the British houses of Parliament in 1605, we wouldn’t have
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The interaction of history and language sometimes produces strange results, and this is one of
the strangest. Here’s how it happened:
Four hundred years ago, the official religion of
England depended on the religion of the monarch.
Queen Elizabeth had died in 1603, to be succeeded
by King James. Both ruled by virtue of being Protestant, head of the Church of England, and independent of the Pope. But there were many Roman
Catholics in England who wanted to return England to Catholicism.
tips for te aching writing
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One of them was Guy Fawkes.
He was an Englishman, born in York in 1570.
As a young man he crossed the English Channel to
fight on the side of Catholic armies in Flanders and
France. In 1604 he slipped back into England and
began working with others to put barrels of gunpowder in a cellar underneath the houses of Parliament. One of his co-conspirators, Thomas Percy,
had conveniently rented a house next door.
They began filling the cellars with gunpowder
in March 1605, and by November were ready to
blow up the place at a time when Parliament would
be in session. But during the night of November
4, a search party inspected the cellars and found
Fawkes with the gunpowder. They arrested him
before he could cause any damage.
Along with four co-conspirators, he was hanged,
drawn, and quartered in January. So much for Guy
Fawkes.
But his name lived on. Hearing of the plot foiled,
on November 5, Londoners started bonfires to celebrate. And Parliament, happy to have escaped,
declared November 5 an annual day of thanksgiving. As the years went on, it became the custom to
make effigies of Guy Fawkes and others (particularly the Pope) and burn them in November 5 bonfires. The effigies were called guys.
Colonial America often celebrated Guy Fawkes
Day as vigorously as England. But with independence came opposition to the anti-Catholic character of the celebration, as well as indifference to the
historical Guy Fawkes. By the mid-19th century, in
American English, guy came to have a more neutral meaning, first a strange-looking straw effigy,
then a strange-looking man, then just any man, a
guy. And so we talk about guys today, a slangy way
of referring to men and boys.
That’s the explanation for guy. But how do we
get you guys, our most common way of addressing
more than one person?
The answer is grammatical. Guy is a noun. But
in you guys, it takes on the guise of a pronoun.
And why is that? Blame it on an epidemic of politeness among speakers of the English language.
In the 18th century, speakers of English became
so polite that they used the polite form you to address not just several people but even just one. Instead of thou art we said you are, even to one person.
But we still like to distinguish between singular and plural in our pronouns, so speakers of English invented a variety of ways to make a plural
form of you. Some added –s in various shapes to
make youse, you’ns, or yinz. Others, especially in
the American South, added all to make you all and
y’all.
And then, around the middle of the past century, people began adding guys to make you guys.
Until then, guy referred just to men and boys, but
the combination you guys acted as a plural second-person pronoun and could be applied to humans of any gender.
No, guys didn’t actually become a pronoun. It remains a noun. It’s just that the combination of you
and guys acts like a plural pronoun. Funny thing,
language!
Once that was established, you guys could
be shortened to guys but still function as a second-person pronoun. “You guys, get to work” could
be expressed as “Guys, get to work” without being
restricted to males.
And so we have you guys today as the most
widely used plural of you, at least in the United
States. If you’re someone, especially someone female, who doesn’t like being addressed as you guys
when you’re dining with a friend in a restaurant,
either because it’s slangy or because guys ought
to be men — you can blame it on Guy Fawkes. But
don’t blame him too much, because if we’d kept
thou, we’d never have you guys.
Allan Metcalf is a professor of English at MacMurray College and executive secretary of the
American Dialect Society.
Originally published on November 6, 2011
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Language History
I’m So Uber You
With the rise of the car service, uber has become an emphatic modifier
By WILLIAM GERMANO
I
t began with Nietzsche. Now it’s about taxitransportation world by storm — not without
cabs.
challenges, but definitely without umlauts. It’s not
We have entered the world of uberness,
Über, and your Uber driver isn’t an Überführer,
or possibly Überness. The Übermensch,
much less an Übermensch. Even in Germany,
Nietzsche suggested in Also Sprach Zarathuswhere the transportation company has entered the
tra, is an alternative to divine authority, a model
fray, you’ll be taking an Uber.
for living beyond what he regarded acidly as the reThat umlaut is a sticking point, but one only
strictive values of organized religion.
wishes it were more adhesive, and not less. I wrote
Nietzsche’s early translators struggled to “Ena while back on how the marketing world loves
glish” the term Übermensch, and we’re still not
umlauts. In some quarters, marketing is nothing if
really there. Overman, Superman — neither feels
not diacritical.
quite right. Both feel awfully 1938. On the one
Over is a good English word that conflates at
hand these English translations bear the taint of
least two senses — above and finished, or über
mid-century German politics. On the other hand,
and kaputt. In English, or at least American,
there’s a reason that Action Comics No. 1 is the
conversation, things can be uber (very), while reworld’s most valuable of all such fragile publicalationships can be — and frequently are — over.
tions: It’s where the character of
Uber gets you there, and over —
Superman made his debut.
well, over just doesn’t.
The prefix über moved out of
Our contemporary use of uber as
German and attached itself, with
an emphatic modifier might also reor without its umlaut, to all sorts
flect the inexhaustible fascination
of words and concepts. The Oxwith superheroes. Hollywood seems
ford English Dictionary provides
never to tire of them; witness the curinstances of uber (or über) from
rent Batman v Superman (I love the
the early 1960s onward, though
deployment of the judicial v here, and
always in combined forms. Thus
am waiting for Justice the Notorious
the OED’s historical archive
RBG to weigh in).
gives us uber-fan, uber-modAs a point of theatrical trivia, I
el, uber-hip, uber-marionnette,
note that the Bernstein, Comden, and
uber-modern. (Reorganize that
Green musical On the Town has a
with mathematical economy and
minor character, a building superinyou get one uber hip model modtendent, billed as Mr. Uperman (full
ern marionette fan.)
name on the character list is S. UpHULTON ARCHIVE, GETTY IMAGES
The OED does not, howeverman).
er, give us an independent,
The show’s even got a musical
free-floating uber.
number that takes place during a taxi ride. In the
I keep hearing uber used as a modifier, and in
1949 film, sailor Frank Sinatra is in the insistent
unlikely ways. There’s the combinatory “She is,
hands of cabbie Betty Garrett.
like, so uber-enthusiastic,” which is evidently very
Nietzsche, contemporary lingo, superheroes, and
very enthusiastic. But there’s also “That was so
cab rides. It’s only a matter of time until a script
uber,” which is a bit like saying something is the ne
bangs them all into one scenario.
plus ultra. The heroine in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline
How about Übermensch v Superman? Now
says that her love is “beyond beyond,” which is tothat’d be a movie I’d buy popcorn for.
tally uber.
I might even Uber to the theater.
I’m tempted to attribute the rise of uber as an
William Germano is dean of humanities at the
independent signifier to the Uber car-service pheCooper Union for the Advancement of Science.
nomenon. Uber, founded in 2009, has taken the
Originally published on May 24, 2016
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